does not import
into them the weight of the future and the regret of the past. To
seize the moment with all its conditions, to press the quality out of
it, that is the best victory. But, alas! we are so made that though we
may know that a course is the wise, the happy, the true course, we
cannot always pursue it. I remember a story of a public man who bore
his responsibilities very hardly, worried and agonised over them,
saying to Mr Gladstone, who was at that time in the very thick of a
fierce political crisis: "But don't you find you lie awake at night,
thinking how you ought to act, and how you ought to have acted?" Mr
Gladstone turned his great, flashing eyes upon his interlocutor, and
said, with a look of wonder: "No, I don't; where would be the use of
that?" And again I remember that old Canon Beadon--who lived, I think,
to his 104th year--said to a friend that the secret of long life in his
own case was that he had never thought of anything unpleasant after ten
o'clock at night. Of course, if you have a series of compartments in
your brain, and at ten o'clock can turn the key quietly upon the room
that holds the skeletons and nightmares, you are a very fortunate man.

But still, we can all of us do something. If one has the courage and
good sense, when in a melancholy mood, to engage in some piece of
practical work, it is wonderful how one can distract the great beast
that, left to himself, crops and munches the tender herbage of the
spirit. For myself I have generally a certain number of dull tasks to
perform, not in themselves interesting, and out of which little
pleasure can be extracted, except the pleasure which always results
from finishing a piece of necessary work. When I am wise, I seize upon
a day in which I am overhung with a shadow of sadness to clear off work
of this kind. It is in itself a distraction, and then one has the
pleasure both of having fought the mood and also of having left the
field clear for the mind, when it has recovered its tone, to settle
down firmly and joyfully to more congenial labours.

To-day, little by little, the cloudy mood drew off and left me smiling.
The love of the peaceful and patient earth came to comfort me. How
pure and free were the long lines of ploughland, the broad back of the
gently-swelling down! How clear and delicate were the February tints,
the aged grass, the leafless trees! What a sense of coolness and
repose! I stopped a long time upon a